Page 5 of The Wild Beneath

“Has a pulse.” Ruth nods. “Let’s roll him onto his side.” She covers him with a flannel blanket she retrieved from the cedar trunk beside the front door; the same trunk Annie has to steel herself for before opening, the one with her dad’s old clothes and their faint smell of fish.

Ruth wedges the oxygen sat probe on the boy’s left index finger. His hands are large and smooth. The probe beeps and glows 99 percent on the screen, pulse 32 beats per minute.

“Too slow,” Annie says.

Ruth pauses. “Maybe it’s a poor tracing.” She digs in her bag for a stethoscope, applies the diaphragm to his chest, and listens to his heart and lungs in a looping repetition.

The thwumping sound from earlier seems to be right here.

“Do you hear that noise?” Annie asks.

“What noise?” Ruth cocks her head, but the stethoscope is still in her ears. “We have to get him up to the cabin,” she says.

“It’s thirty feet up. He’s too heavy.”

“We can’t leave him here,” Ruth says. “He needs an IV. He’s probably dehydrated. Hypothermic.”

“But his skin’s hot.”

Ruth pulls the thermometer out of her bag and puts it in his ear. The number rises to 39.5 degrees Celsius. “He’s febrile,” she says, then puts down all her instruments simultaneously.

“Why would he have a fever?”

Ruth’s breath hitches and she’s suddenly pale, ashen under her cheekbones. Glassy-eyed.

Annie reaches for her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Ruth looks away, toward the ocean, as if she’s lost track of what she was doing. Annie can’t help following her gaze, can’t help hoping again. Until Ruth abruptly turns back. “We have an old EMS stretcher in the shed.” Her voice is hoarse.

“Did you think you saw Mom and Dad?”

Ruth leans forward and puts her hand on Annie’s thigh. “No, honey.”

“When I look at the ocean, I keep thinking I can see them.”

“Because it’s impossible not to think that,” Ruth says.

Annie closes her eyes tightly. She’s inside the tsunami, again—­the dank water she’ll never be able to swim across. The ground gives way under her feet; a riptide yanks against the backs of her calves. The clouds condense and press down on her shoulders.

Ruth’s voice interrupts the collapse of the sky: “We can strap him in and use the boat pulleys to get him up the bluff.”

Annie is nowhere that pulleys matter or even exist. “When I first saw him, I thought it was them, too,” she whispers.

Ruth hasn’t heard her. “We’ll get the old stretcher.”

Annie manages to nod—­is she nodding?—­her eyes still closed and the rest of her body numb.

But thethwump-thwumpsound returns. It enters her joints, rises from her feet into her knees and hips. Her panic abates by degrees. Air finds the bottom of her lungs.

Ruth is already climbing the ladder. She’s near the top by the time Annie’s legs obey.

Half an hour later, the boy is secured to an orange slider board.

They’d retired it a decade ago from the single Hale’s Landing ambulance, but Ruth was never one to get rid of something that might serve a purpose, like carting a spongy-skinned boy up a thirty-foot bluff. Both women heave and grunt and lift and sweat, taking turns holding his weight while the other catches her breath, praying the pulleys hold, willing the knots to stay strong, until they’ve reached solid ground.

“You can’t hear that sound?” Annie asks again as they finally carry him—­lanky arms and legs—­through the cabin door and into the living room.

“Hear what?” Ruth is sweaty, breathing much harder than Annie is.